Lepo Mikko (born Leonid Mikko) was born on 7 December 1911, in Tuhalaane, Viljandi County,\ninto a family of farmers. In 1927, following the example of Juhan Muks, he enrolled in the Tallinn\nSchool of Art and Crafts. However, the dry teaching methods did not suit him, and after three years\nMikko decided to continue his education at Pallas, in Tartu.<\/p>\n
Because his parents did not support Mikko\u2019s art studies, the young man had to work, holding a job\nfor three and a half years as a painter and surveyor and as a photographer in Karksi-Nuia. Thus,\nMikko\u2019s studies in Pallas continued with interruptions until 1939. In 1944, during the bombing of\nTartu, the artist\u2019s home was hit and, among other things, Mikko\u2019s works from his time in Pallas\nwere destroyed. In the same year the family moved to Tallinn, where Mikko started to work as a\npainting teacher at the Institute of Fine Arts, becoming a professor in 1965.<\/p>\n
Mikko\u2019s painting style was epic and he was most drawn to archaic themes. In his views of Viljandi,\nMikko is not entangled in details or close-ups, but depicts the city in a characteristically Nordic,\naustere, and balanced manner (Vallikivi, 2020). The artist developed his distinctive style of painting\n\nin the second half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, when he also became more interested\nin monumental painting. His landscape paintings reveal the artist\u2019s love of nature. Mikko had a\nprimordial, instinctive affection for nature, painting the merging and becoming one with the\nlandscape.<\/p>\n
Lepo Mikko returned to the Viljandi art scene in the 1960s, while at the same time teaching at the\nInstitute of Fine Arts and being actively involved in creative activities. He came to Viljandi because\nhe longed for his childhood home, which he never got back; instead, Mikko spent most of his\nsummers in his summer cottage in Loodi. In 1961, there was still no gallery in Viljandi, which\nslowed down the development of the art scene in steadily growing Viljandi. Mikko\u2019s paintings were\nexhibited at the Viljandi Museum together with the works of painter Juhan Muks, sculptor Aino\nT\u00f5nisson-Sepp (1932\u20131996) and graphic artist T\u00f5nis Lukats (1907\u20131996). During the period\n1973\u20131982, there were no art exhibitions even in the museum. When an art hall was opened in the\nformer Communist Party headquarters in 1991, exhibitions began to be organised under the\nleadership of Aate-Heli \u00d5un, who brought numerous exhibitions of Estonian art classics to Viljandi,\nincluding an exhibition of Lepo Mikko\u2019s works (Vallikivi, 2020).<\/p>\n